


Fire on the Mountain

by amelia_petkova



Category: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amelia_petkova/pseuds/amelia_petkova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johnny has always been passionate about music. One Christmas morning, the Devil finds him. Or is it Johnny who finds the Devil?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire on the Mountain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vtn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I do not own the song “The Devil went Down to Georgia” or its characters.

Johnny had been expecting horns and a tail. To be fair, the tail could be hidden under the coat—Yankees might think everything south of Pennsylvania to be the tropics and swampland, but even the mountains in Georgia got a mite chilly at Christmas. And the horns could be underneath all the curly hair. Reverend Carter’s sermons had implied that Satan’s garb was coal-black from head to toe, but this man had a fine crop of curls as blond as those of Beth-Ann MacPherson from the next farm over. Well, but he was still sure it must be the Devil: nobody else was likely to appear out of nowhere dressed so find in the depths of the Blue Ridge Mountains on Christmas. 

Johnny finished the last few bars of his song and lowered his bow. Risky to play his fiddle outdoors in winter but the day was mild enough that the strings should be safe from snapping. In any case, he’d had to do something to catch the Devil’s attention.

“Johnny Drummond?” the Devil asked.

Johnny nodded with the innocent eyes he had perfected whenever Pa wanted to know who had riled up the chickens. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Nick,” the Devil drawled, “and I have a bargain that might interest you.” 

And inside of his head, Johnny started to smile

#

Johnny’s family was full of music. They sang to pass the time while doing chores, they practiced music after supper, they lifted up their voices at church, and they played at every barn-raising, dance, and wedding. All of the other families on their part of the mountain had an appreciation for music, as was only right and proper, but it was the Drummonds who were known for their skilled hands and golden voices.

More than once his mother said, “You beat about so much when I was carrying you, I thought for sure you would be born with a drum in your hands.” 

He did indeed like to play at being a drummer, slapping the table with his hands and snapping spoons against the empty washbasin as a child. The banjo was a delight; there were many tunes suited to it, and for fingers that regularly held a hoe it wasn’t difficult to get callouses. The dulcimer was also one of his favorites, but it was the fiddle that his heart and hands truly belonged to.

Johnny’s grandfather played the fiddle. Grandpap’s legs didn’t work so well anymore but he still had the hands of a young man. He could make that polished old fiddle wail, or warble, or sound like a full church choir as the mood took him. 

“I want to learn how,” Johnny demanded when he was still a mite. That earned him a swat on the bottom from Mama for his disrespectful tone, but Grandpap cocked a bushy eyebrow. 

“Might as well get started, then,” he said. 

Grandpap rustled up a second fiddle and gave lessons in between chores. Johnny hadn’t expected real work. It was harder than expected to keep the fiddle in place under his jaw and the pigs ran squealing when he first dragged the bow across the strings. 

Grandpap howled with laughter at the look on Johnny’s face. “That’s right; it’ll get worse before it gets better.”

But something in Johnny wouldn’t let him chuck the fiddle in the pigpen. He kept at it and soon enough he was making notes that could be heard by creatures other than dogs. His fingers cramped and his neck grew stiff, but he didn’t stop. He learned to adapt the songs he already knew from singing or other instruments: church melodies, dances, reels, and ballads, he played them all. Grandpap having been a musician for so many years, he was able to teach songs the boy hadn’t heard yet. Johnny would still perform with other instruments if requested but all his family and neighbors soon came to refer to him as “the boy with the fiddle”. And although Johnny loved music for its own sake, it didn’t hurt that the girls on nearby farms favored good-looking musicians.

#

In addition to playing music or singing after the day’s work was done, the people around Johnny liked to tell stories. Some were as mild as gossiping about what Mr. Donovan was rumored to have done with pretty Miss Jacobson that time he drank most of a jug of whiskey at the 4th of July party. Other stories had more of a twist.

Tales of haints and other unnatural creatures were as common as leaves on the ground. Growing up on the mountain, all the children heard tales of revenants, curses, and stories like the bride whose head fell off when her husband untied the ribbon round her neck. 

Then there were Devil tales. You didn’t hear those as often. They weren’t even talked about directly—the person would be talking about something else altogether and the Devil would sidle in. That was how Johnny learned that the hollow in one of the boulders by the swimming hole was where the Devil had set foot, and how on truly stormy nights when the house shook, the Devil was galloping up and down the mountains. And when Widow Jones took ill for over a week, it was because she’d taken a shortcut through the cemetery after dark and the Devil had seen her. 

Johnny half-believed the stories. He scoffed at some of them in the daytime but it was a different thing at night, when the sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the owls were hooting.

It wasn’t until he was in his teens that he heard about deals with the Devil. Reverend Carter instructed the congregation to “avoid Satan’s sweet-sounding temptations” but he was always vague about the details. Fortunately, Grandpap was a more useful source of information.

“He’s the Devil—of course he’s going to have some tricks up his sleeve. You watch out, boy, or else you’ll be dragged to an eternity of fire and brimstone before you can blink. You know that abandoned shack by the stream?”

Johnny. It wasn’t entirely abandoned—he had used it last week for stealing a few kisses from pretty Beth-Ann MacPherson but it didn’t seem like the time to contradict Grandpap. Besides, the shack _did_ look rarely used. Wasn’t even any whiskey stored there. 

“There was a hunter who lived there in my grandpap’s day. He was a good trapper but one winter came when he couldn’t catch more than a squirrel. He was so desperate, he said he’d bargain with even the Devil for better luck hunting. Half the folks thought he was joking, the other half tried to talk some sense into him. But he went out in the middle of winter and they never saw him again.”

“ _Never?_ ”

“Not ever.”

“How did he find the Devil?” Johnny asked. 

“It’s said you have to go out and offer something you value. If the Devil’s interested, he’ll come out and meet with you.” Grandpap shook a finger in Johnny’s face. “Don’t you ever do it. Nobody’s ever made a deal with the Devil and won.”

Johnny shivered. “I won’t.”

#

Throughout his life, Johnny felt that nobody could celebrate Christmas better than the people on the Blue Ridge Mountains. They didn’t need chests of money to make their homes festive, with all the pines, berries, and other decorations the mountains provided. Extra candles were lit for the festivities and every wife outdid herself with the food. Sometimes Johnny wondered why they did not all hibernate like bears after stuffing themselves with cakes and meats and breads.

His favorite part however, was Breaking Up Christmas. For two whole weeks after Christmas, it was parties with music at a different house each night. As a small boy, he had partly loved it because it was the one time of year when children weren’t sent to bed early. His other favorite part was the music, even before he had learned to properly play any instruments. The musicians could do for hours without stopping and it seemed as if they knew every tune in the world. It felt as though the very roof beams vibrated with the sound. Things became even better after Johnny took to the fiddle and was old enough to join the musicians. He was still a bit young for it at thirteen years old, but Grandpap said he was old enough and the rest of the musicians welcomed him. Nothing beat the exhilarating feeling of playing with others who were just as devoted to music and valued it above almost all else. Their entertainment was welcome in every home they could reach.

Nobody had more fun at Christmas than the folks in the mountains.

#

Something changed the year Johnny turned seventeen. It wasn’t wanderlust—he loved his part of the mountains heart and soul, and had no desire to leave it. It wasn’t a desire for riches—they might not have piles of gold in his house but they had enough. And anyway, he didn’t need more than his music. Yet something nagged at him. It took him half the year to realize that it was the desire for a challenge. “Young blood needing to settle down” his mother would have said, but Johnny knew he had to do something about it.

Damned if he knew what to do, though. Then one of his cousins mentioned not having any luck during a hunting weekend in November, and Johnny started to remember the hunter that Grandpap’s grandpap had known. And he remembered bargains with the Devil. 

And yes, he remembered that he had promised never to make a deal with the Devil. But was it really making a deal if you knew you could win? There was one thing Johnny knew he knew he could do better than any living person or unnatural creature, and that was music. He devoted himself to the fiddle more than ever, practicing all the songs he knew. His younger brothers complained that he kept them awake by humming tunes in his sleep. Johnny just laughed and hit them good-naturedly with a pillow.

By mid-December he knew himself to be ready. What better time to lure the Devil out than on Christmas morning? It was settled: go out, best the Devil, and be home in time for the start of breaking up Christmas.

#

“So what do you say?” the Devil asked in a smooth voice. “Your fiddle-playing against mine. You win, you get a fiddle made of gold. I win,” and here the Devil rubbed his hands together before continuing, “and I get your soul.”

Johnny let his innocent-boy mask slip and laugh. “You have a bargain. But mark my words, you’re gonna regret, ‘cause I’m the best there’s ever been!”


End file.
